On belonging

December 10, 2025

I recently read Alvin Chang's article The Middle Ages. I strongly agree that your sense of belonging depends on your environment, but I believe there's nothing inherently bad about middle schools. Not all models are bad for belonging! Some from other countries have stable cohorts, some even pinning the teacher! I personally went to a school that had a gifted program (which I'll refer to as acceleration), which had a side effect of giving me a mostly stable cohort.

I would definitely say that I had fun in middle school and that I belonged. In my cohort, I could settle down, get to really know people, have fun before and after school, and have some of my best years.

High school, on the other hand

Wait but why? It's multifaceted. Let's pull up a Sankey to analyze the people aspect.

Going to high school clearly removed some of and diluted the rest of the friends I had in acceleration. This graph isn't even showing those who left the school system instead of going to high school, who the system still believes to be attending middle school.

What about more systemic things, like the number of different classes, and the number of teachers and sections per class? Can these explain why I don't share many classes with anyone? Well, the ways these change from middle school to high school literally inhibit homophily: two people who both want to take a similar class might end up in different classes taught by different teachers at different times of the day.

I would definitely not say that I had fun in high school and that I belonged. These were some of my worst years.

To riff on Alvin's "complaints from middle schoolers": Humans are social animals, and when you go to a megaschool there's a whole domino effect that makes you lose your sense of order and belonging. But the architecture is also a little hostile, peers are a little toxic, and we don't do things or care in the same way we did in middle school.